Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now – and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

352. “Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation – overcrowding – reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you’re not, what does that mean? Maybe that you’re afraid of human contact – of being close to people, of being touched.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

353. “Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

354. “To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

355. “If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

356. “But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

357. “In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful – another piston in the great machine?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

358. “The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren’t actually men.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

359. “I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

360. “And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

361. “What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn from our birthday to last day – from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

362. “Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

363. “Old Age Is Not for the Young.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

364. “Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number – Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

365. “The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

366. “Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

367. “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

368. “Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

369. “If your voice is heard by more people because you’ve earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

370. “All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

371. “Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

372. “I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

373. “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

374. “It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

375. “If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin – the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin’s thinking.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

376. “The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved; the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

377. “Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

378. “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

379. “To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

380. “Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

381. “But the death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of death’s kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

382. “There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

383. “We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can’t choose where to listen.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

384. “Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

385. “She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It’s the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

386. “Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

387. “What is more arrogant than honesty?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

388. “Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

389. “The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock’s tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they should not be confused.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

390. “What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

391. “There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

392. “Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

393. “The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

394. “It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

395. “Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

396. “The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

397. “Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

398. “Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

399. “There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

400. “There is no kingdom like the forests.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin